Meet Katie at the beginning of her story.... 

 HOOFBEATS: BOOK ONE

Katie and The Mustang

CHAPTER ONE

I was hiding from Mrs. Stevens that day. It was cold in the barn, though not bitter, not too bad for early February. We’d had one warm snap that hatched a few flies, then it had stormed again. There were dirty banks of snow along the roads.

I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders. It was too big—it was a cast off from Mr. Stevens—but my dress was getting too small. It was about worn out. The blue homespun was faded and stained and one sleeve had a long, mended tear. I didn’t care about any of that as much the way it pulled across my back.

It was just past sunrise.  I had done my early chores—the milk was poured into the cooling can, the milk bucket washed. Mrs. Stevens insisted on that, every day. The minute the milk was poured out, the bucket had to be scrubbed with soap in the tin basin. Every two days, I had to change the wash water.

I sighed. I knew I should go back to the house to begin the real work of the day. I just didn’t want to.

I took a long breath and my dress rubbed against the welts on my back. They weren’t that bad, in a few days they’d be gone. But they hurt. My throat ached and then, all of a sudden, my eyes stung.  I pressed my lips together, hard. I did not want to cry. No amount of tear-shedding was going to change Mrs. Stevens’s temperament.

She had willow-switched me the day before…she was  convinced I’d taken a spoon from her mother’s silver service set.  I hadn’t. What would I want with a spoon?

Hiram Weiss was the only other possible suspect, though, and no one would ever think he had taken it.  I liked Hiram.  He didn’t talk very much, but he always nodded and smiled at me.  He was from back east somewhere. Mrs. Stevens had told me he’d had some back luck back there.  She hadn’t said more.  I think she didn’t know anything more.  Hiram was tight lipped.  But everyone liked him; no one bothered him.  He was as big as they come—broad and tall and heavy—plenty old enough to have a wife and children, but didn’t have either.  Mrs. Stevens always complained of the amount he ate at her table—but not to his face. Good farm hands were not so easy to find with everyone at loose ends deciding to pick up and go West.

“I’m sure Mrs. Stevens lost her own ding-dang spoon,”  I  said. I took a breath and opened my mouth to tell Betsy more about it, to tell her how Mrs. Stevens had scowled at me when I insisted I hadn’t taken anything of hers, how she had sent me down to the creek to cut the willow switch. But that wasn’t what came out.  What came out was this:

“It was all over in three weeks.”

Betsy wasn’t looking at me as I spoke.  She never did. I cleared my throat. “The fever was wildfire fast. Everyone says so.”

I paused while the familiar pain in my throat got worse. I couldn’t even whisper the rest of it, about the fever that had taken Mama and Pa and Tess. It had been almost three years ago and I could still barely even think it. I longed to wake up one morning and have it not be true. But every morning I woke up—and it was. 

Betsy shifted her weight.  She turned her head to look at me, chewing her cud.  Then she switched her ropey tail and stamped one hind hoof.  A half dozen chilly flies rose an inch from the straw, then settled again. They were too cold to fly any farther. I pulled in a long, slow breath of barn-dust and hay-smell.

“On the funeral-day,” I said quietly, “I just sat in the parlor while neighbor women fussed over the food.”

I stopped to breathe in and out slowly, long enough to keep myself from crying. Then I went on. “Mrs. O’Reilly, Mrs. Gleason, and Mrs. McMahon came from their farms.  I hated the smell of their cooking in Mama’s kitchen. I just hated them for being in there at all.” I tacked the last part on in a near whisper.

I had been six years old when the fever hit. Mrs. O’Reilly, Mrs. Gleason, and Mrs. McMahon; I could barely picture their faces now—nor the faces of their children—even though I had gone to church with all of them. I hadn’t seen any of them even once since that day. The Stevenses were not Irish nor Catholic—they weren’t anything at all. So we never went to the little church that had no priest but still held prayer meetings.

I looked out the big double doors at the shade tree outside and sighed. I was 20 miles or more from my parents’ farm in Cedar County.  I had never asked to go back and Mr. Stevens had never offered to take me.  But Mama and Pa and Tess were buried on a ridge behind the house my father had built. So maybe the farm I had been born on still belonged to my family. In a way, maybe it was still my real home.

I cried a little. I was used to crying. But then I hushed so I could listen for the sound of the front door. If Mrs. Stevens caught me idling, she’d make me scrub down her porch floors with sand, or lime the privy, or something just as bad.

When I had first come, she had often twisted a strand of my hair around her finger and smiled, saying it was the color of fresh field corn. But things had changed within a month. I had never been able to figure out why.  Maybe she had thought I would think of her as my mother—she had no children of her own.  I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  My mother had laughed all the time. She had enjoyed sunrise and making bread and playing with my sister and me.

After that first month, Mrs. Stevens seemed angry with me most the time. It was even worse now. After my last bath she had all but pulled my tangled curls out of my scalp—she had brushed my hair that hard. 

“I was so relieved when Mr. Stevens said he’d take me in,” I whispered to Betsy. “I was so afraid no one would—all the closest neighbors had big families they could barely feed. I know they all thought this was best for me, but now…”

The old cow flopped her ears and stared at nothing, her jaw working steadily. She was a Jersey milker and she had a simple life. Daytime was for eating, nights were for sleeping. She stood still when I milked her morning and evening.  She was glad to see me when her bag was full and heavy. In between, she paid less attention to me that a tree stump would have. Sometimes I envied her.

I sighed. The horses were more polite about listening, but they were all out of the barn this morning. Mr. Stevens had hitched Delia and Midnight to the buggy and gone to town and Hiram had the draft horses dragging the sledge over the half-frozen ground down by the creek.

Last year’s corn stalks were still standing, dried and brown—Mr. Stevens had let them go last fall because of an early wet spell. Hiram Weiss had said once that Mr. Stevens hated farming. He surely wasn’t very good at it.  Yet he always seemed to have money and I wondered more than once where it came from. 

Hiram was a grand farmer, but he didn’t have his own farm any more than I did. He told me once that New York City was full of people who couldn’t find enough work to eat and that Scott County, Iowa was a paradise compared to what was going on back there.

I liked Hiram. He had first come around asking for work the year before.  He reminded me a little of my father.  Pa was quiet, but he liked to hear other people talk about when to plant  and how to store grain and everything in between. My mother had liked cooking for guests when we had enough to go around.  So we’d had neighbors sitting on our porch once or twice a month—whenever anyone came by our place on their way to Davenport for dry goods or salt or to visit the courthouse.

Mrs. Stevens almost never had a caller. Mr. Stevens got in the buggy and went visiting on his own whenever he needed a conversation—sometimes he went all the way to Davenport—but he almost never took his wife. And I was sure he never once thought about taking me along, even though he knew I had written five letters to my Uncle Jack over the past year and desperately wanted an answer. He barely noticed me unless I did something wrong.

“I’ll milk early tonight if I can,” I said to Betsy.  She flicked one floppy funnel-shaped ear. 

I heard a familiar mewling behind me as I picked up the milk bucket. I glanced over my shoulder.  “Tiger? What do you want?  Milk?” I made my voice sound like I was astonished. Tiger didn’t understand the joke.

She stretched, arching her back and her long tail.  She listened to me sometimes, but only so long as I scratched her ears.  If I stopped, she would stalk away, her knees stiff and her tail twitching.

“Katie!” 

I jumped, my heart slamming at my ribs. 

Mrs. Stevens has a voice like a branch scraping a tin roof when she raises it to shout—and she sounded close.  She was coming up the barn path.  Why hadn’t I heard the front door shut?

I smoothed my dress where it hung below my coat, trying to think what excuse I might give. I had finished hanging the laundry and had split stovewood for tomorrow an hour quicker than usual just to warm myself up. But that wouldn’t matter. Here I was, sitting idle and nowhere to hide.

“Katie Rose!”

I stood up and ran three steps to snatch a pitchfork from its wall hooks. It was a silly ruse. Hiram kept the stalls clean and the aisles swept. What chore could I pretend to be doing with a pitchfork?

But then the door swung wide; I blinked at the sudden glare. There was an old, spreading ash tree outside, but the shade was broken by a shaft of early morning sunlight.  With the sun behind her, Mrs. Stevens looked golden, like an angel.  Then she stepped inside the dim barn and she was a pinch-mouthed farmwife again. 

“Katie! Whatever do you do out here?”

I knew better than to answer.  Any explanation would be the wrong one, especially the truth. Talking to a cow?

“I asked you a question.” Mrs. Stevens put her hands on her hips.

I just stood there, my eyes down.

Mrs. Stevens sighed.  “Daydreaming and mooning again?  Do you think that’ll get the chores done?  Perhaps a few hours of real work would cure you of idleness. Or maybe a long stand in the corner.”

My whole body went stiff. I hated standing in the corner worse than extra chores or even getting a whipping. She knew it.

Mrs. Stevens suddenly tilted her head. “Oh my,” she breathed. “He’s early.” 

Then I heard it, too; faint hoofbeats and the distant grating of metal-shod cartwheels. Mr. Stevens was coming home. 

Mrs. Stevens had turned to face the barn door. Now she spun around and made a motion like she was shooing hens. “Hurry!”

I almost smiled.  I was afraid of her.  But she was afraid of him. Mr. Stevens never struck his wife, but he shouted and cursed sometimes if he saw her idle. And he took pride in her never talking back to hi, ever.  I had heard him brag about it to Hiram.  When he shouted at Mrs. Stevens, she would shrink in on herself for days afterward. But she never seemed angry at him, only at herself—and me.

“Sssst!” Mrs. Stevens hissed again, glaring. “Come on, girl, come on!” 

“Yes, Ma’am,” I answered, still fighting the smile.  She was whispering as though her husband, still half mile away, could somehow hear her. 

I leaned the pitchfork against the wall and followed her along the lilac hedge, down into the yard.  The dogs were milling at our feet and Mrs. Stevens shut them up in their pen. “Get the rug beaters!” she ordered over her shoulder.  Her voice was even sharper than usual. I set the milk bucket inside the back door and ran for the pantry-closet.

By the time the cart clattered around the springhouse we were both beating the rugs she had hung on the fence two days before to air, the beater wires humming. I hated this chore. I always coughed the whole time, breathing the fine grayish dust. The spring-wire handle of the beater was freezing cold and it rubbed hard on my palm, too, but it didn’t hurt anymore. I had grown calluses for it.  What hurt were the willow-switch stripes on my back where my dress pulled across my back.

Mrs. Stevens beat her rugs four times a year. She loved them. They were ugly, I thought, dark red with big white and black diamond shapes around the edges. But the wool was still thick and tight. They had been her grandmother’s, brought all the way from England seventy years before.

I had once spilt milk on the edge of the biggest one. Mrs. Stevens’s face had turned the color of her precious rugs. She had scolded me like a mean dog growls, standing within an inch of my nose, shaming me for ruining what the women in her family had kept stainless for three generations. I knew why the rugs had lasted that long.  Her grandmothers had probably been strict and mean and had company only once or twice a year, just like her. The Stevens house was a quiet as midnight most the time.

“Mind you do it in a circle pattern,” Mrs. Stevens scolded me lightly.

She had it all figured out. The best way to knock dust and dirt out of a rug was to hit it in a rapid circle that got wider and wider as you went around it. It seemed silly to me.

I looked up. The carriage was nearly to the yard drive.

“See that you keep beating,” Mrs. Stevens warned me.

“I will,” I promised, and waited until she had walked away to angle my body so I could wallop the blasted rug and watch the cart approach at the same time.

The buggy team was trotting, Mr. Stevens’s string-leather whip popping above their backs. I loved to watch the mares, their knees and fetlocks snapping up and down, as regular as the beat of a duck’s wings. Their manes flew out behind as the road angled and they crossed the breeze.

It was then that I noticed.  Tied behind the cart was a horse I had never seen before.  He was the color of dark honey, with a mane and tail as black as midnight. He ticked a front hoof and stumbled, then caught his stride again as Mr. Stevens reined the mares in. Mrs. Stevens walked to meet the wagon. I stood still, beating the rug, watching. 

Mr. Stevens set the brake handle and climbed down, stiff and gimpy from the long ride.  He was smiling, though.  He pointed at the horse. “He’s a Mustang, fresh broke-in, and I got him cheap. He needs feeding up.”

Mrs. Stevens nodded cautiously.

Mr. Stevens was standing tall, his collar was buttoned high.  He laid one finger on his own cheek, something he often did when he was about to say something he thought truly important. “Mustangs make fine saddle horses,” he announced, “if a man can handle them.”

“Mustangs?”  Mrs. Stevens spat out the unfamiliar word like it tasted sour.

Mr. Stevens glanced past her and noticed me. “Haven’t you got something to do?”

I realized I had stopped beating the rug and started up again. 

“Go see if there are more eggs for supper,” Mrs. Stevens shouted at me. “And mind you don’t bother the broody-hen!”

Glad to be done with the cloud of rug-dust, I hung the beater on its nail by the back door, glancing back over my shoulder every few seconds.

Mr. Stevens had untied the Mustang stallion and was leading him toward the barn. He was the most beautiful horse I had ever seen, even though he was too thin—his sides were ridged by his ribs.  He looked young, but he walked like an old pasture mare, aged past having colts or buggy work, scuffing the toe of each hoof in the dust. 

At the barn door, the stallion hesitated.  He tossed his head and the sunlight caught his dark gold coat, glinting like kindling sparks.  Mr. Stevens jerked the lead rope. The stallion stepped forward into the barn and the sparks went out.